A lot can be said about Rihanna and Drake's hit song work. It completely
owned the charts in 2016. Its dance hall beat and endless repetition were the
ultimate example of where the sound of pop was going. It did everything most top
forties hits were doing - except for one thing - it faded out. Let me start by
making a confession here, I used to hate when songs faded out. it felt like a
cop-out. A lack of creativity. A boring anti-ending to a song that I otherwise
really loved. It turns out that this is the wrong opinion. The fade out
is misunderstood and under-appreciated. There's an art to it. A science to it. And
when executed correctly, the fade out makes a song feel like it'll live on
forever. This chart, which is pretty cool, shows the number of songs that had a
fade out on the Billboard top 10 from 1946 to 2016. It was made by this guy. My
name is Bill Weir and I'm a writer - mostly about music and specifically
about technology of music and history of the music technology. So the chart starts
in 1946 but the story of the fade out actually begins in 1918. Gustav Holtz was
conducting his world-famous piece "The Planets" and he devised a unique way to
convey the distance of Neptune - at the time the farthest known planet in the
solar system. So he wanted to create the sense of almost unimaginable distance
and the mysteriousness of the cosmos. He had the women's choir offstage in a room
and he instructed a stagehand to slowly close the door to create the
effect of it fading out and going off into the distance.
People loved that, it went over huge. I mean today we take the fade out for granted,
but in 1918 it was like a whole new whole new sonic adventure for them.
In the early days, the fade out was a novelty. It was really only used to
convey real-world scenarios like distance and space. That is until the
1950s and 60s when sound recording wasn't just used to preserve a live
performance, it became its own art form. The fade out quickly became a creative
and functional tool for record producers. Functional, because radio deejays
demanded songs be three minutes or less. If the album version was longer
producers would typically cut a shorter radio-friendly version that faded during
the chorus. Fade outs were also used to fix flubs here's the full waveform for
strawberry fields forever. You can see a really long fade out and then it
suddenly starts coming back. George Martin, the Beatles producer, wasn't crazy
about the percussion towards the end of the song and so he faded the song out.
But then he hears all the great music that happens after the fade-out that the
Beatles continued to play and he hated to waste that so he faded back in.
Not only is there an art to the fade out, there's a science to it also. Here Susan
Rogers. To do a fade properly you have to do something called chasing the fade. So
we know from the Fletcher-Munson curves that our ears don't perceive
frequencies of sound equally when played at the same volume. if you've got the
speakers cranked you're hearing approximately equal levels of bass
mid-range and high-end. But as soon as you turn the level down, it becomes
really hard to hear the high highs and the low lows, but you can hear the mid-range
very well. If you lowered everything equally the singer would just be hanging
out there all by themselves. You can hear that on Prince's "Slow Love" which Susan
worked on.
The fade out became so ubiquitous that by 1985 all top 10 songs of the year had
one. But there's something more to the fade out than being another fashionable
trend in music. When psychologists studied how different types of song
endings affected our experiences with them, they found something pretty amazing.
The researchers, they had a group of subjects listen to the same song but
two different versions, one with a fade out one of the cold ending and they
had them tap along to the beat of each version. If a song had a hard ending,
participants on average stopped tapping along to the beat 1.04 seconds
before the end of the song. If it had a fade out they'd stop tapping along to
the beat 1.40 seconds after the song ended. In a sense that song was
living beyond its physical self in the mind of the listener.
That might help explain why The Beatles 7-minute "Hey Jude" has a fade out that's
about as long as their entire early singles. "Hey Jude" was released after The
Beatles stopped touring, they didn't need to perform it live. Well until they did
this one TV performance. It's my pleasure to introduce now in their first live
appearance for goodness knows how long in front of an audience the Beatles. It
took at least 12 takes a lot of editing and a visual fade to black to recreate
the same epic fade out of the recorded version.
The fade out was such a long-lasting record making tool, it was used in some
of the biggest hits for decades, but its future isn't looking so great. Yeah I
mean it's kind of sad because the fade out's
demise is kind of a replication of the effect itself in that its actually
literally fading out in popular music, and so slowly and gradually that I think
most people don't even notice. There are plenty of songs over the last few years
that would have been better served with a fade out like Gotye's "Somebody that
I used to know" It just suddenly ends and they they threw at Tom or something in
there they just went boom and it sounds so pasted on to my ear. Bruno Mars' "24k
magic" and "That's what I like" have abrupt endings to when they sound like they
could fade out forever.
Pick any number of songs these days and those pasted on endings are the norm.
Want to know what work sounds like with a hard ending? It's terrible. The fade-out
it turns out, is important and often necessary. It's a tool in a record
producers arsenal that makes us tap our feet along even after our ears perceive
the very last notes. And I hope, just like the ending of "Strawberry fields forever"
it comes back. It's hard to say whether or not the fade-out will actually be as
prominent as it was 30 or 40 years ago I just look at the Top 40 today and only three
songs had legitimate fade outs that I could find. could find.
Those three songs are actually really good hint for the next earworm episode.
So go listen to the billboard top 40. Try to find those three songs.
And let me know what you think the next episode is gonna be about.